


Floriographic Sequences

by Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Background Character Death, Canon Compliant, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Kamome, Kamome: A Soft Viktor Zine, Language of Flowers, M/M, Romance, Softviktorzine, Viktor is an orphan, Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 19:49:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14701005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities/pseuds/Orchids_and_Fictional_Cities
Summary: Viktor is fluent in the language of flowers. He strings together sentences, poems, litanies with bouquets and petals and love.He hears nothing back but noise.





	Floriographic Sequences

**Author's Note:**

> This is my piece from last year's _[Kamome: A Soft Viktor Zine](http://softviktorzine.tumblr.com/)_ , 1/2 of a collaborative effort with the wonderful Yuuya/nakutan, whose art I've linked at the end ❤

✾ ✾ ✾

 

The first time he learns of the language of flowers, it’s from Mama, waving at him from just outside the Kiss and Cry, a bouquet of carnations and celandine in her arms. The colors clash with one another, pink against yellow. Viktor tries to imagine a skating costume with those colors, because he thinks of little else but skating these days. But he can’t make it work in his mind.

The meaning is more important, she tells him. Pink carnations signify a mother’s love; celandines, _‘joys to come’_. She teaches him the language, bit by bit, words and sentiment spelled out in petals, leaves, and sometimes thorns. He’s a long way from becoming fluent, but he’s intrigued. There’s magic in it, he thinks, something that voices and letters can’t convey.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

This language isn’t one that’s familiar to all, as he comes to know. He learns this when, after the car crash that killed Mama and Papa both, he gets flowers sent to his hospital room.  

The cards and letters all say the same things. _‘So sorry for your loss.’_ _‘They will be missed.’_ But they're all noise to him, because the flowers they chose are beautiful gibberish, and it angers him. And he fixates on this because if he doesn’t, he’ll have to come to terms with _other_ things, and he’s… not ready for that. Not yet.

When his aunt shows up with a small bouquet of dried white roses and cypress springs, he understands: _‘with heartfelt sympathy, in your time of sorrow’_. This one, he keeps next to the table by his bedside. That way, if he’s willing to fool himself, it feels almost like Mama is still here.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

The day he's finally discharged from the hospital is a haze of trepidation and unease. Although his gravest injuries have mostly healed, the ache of grief has started to shift into something sharper. He’s not ready for it. Distant relatives tell him he’s lucky: to be alive; to be whole (somewhat); to still be able to skate. And he’s lucky that the Feltsman household, in their generosity, have agreed to take him in. He’s not ready for that, either.

Yet, when he crosses the threshold, the first thing he sees is a burst of purple: wisteria, _‘welcoming’_ , sitting in a basket on top of the coffee table. And he starts to feel like maybe he can breathe again.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

The very first man Viktor ever falls in love with is a skater himself, one half of an ice dance pair that Viktor swears he thought was a couple. Apparently they’re not, though, because the man springs him with a bouquet of red roses in the locker room the night before Valentine’s Day 2009. He mumbles, ‘for you’ - as though that isn’t clear with the roses inches from Viktor’s face, or the fact that there’s no-one else in sight.

Roses are the most talkative of flowers, but pure red ones signify the highest of promises: _true love,_ so simple, yet so profound. That such a promise was made so carelessly at the very beginning should have given him pause. But Viktor accepts them anyway, and reciprocates, naively believing that the language Mama taught him is universal. He opens up his heart too easily, and only winds up wounded as a reward.

Their breakup is messy and spectacular. Viktor has to pick up the pieces before the season even ends.

He never sends red roses after that. And whenever he receives them, he knows better than to believe.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

Viktor will never know the name of the person who gave him his first blue roses. After the free skate where he landed the first ratified quad flip in competition, the ice became a veritable sea of flowers - mostly singletons, but there were some bouquets as well, from tightly-packed Biedermeiers to assortments hand-tied in ribbons. He finds happiness in the shower of affection and tries not to focus too much on the words they might not realize they’re saying.

He tries, that is, until he sees a ring of blue sailing into the rink, landing at his feet. The color is so vivid, and it stands out so much against the rain of reds and whites and pinks that he’s used to. When he picks it up, he feels wires and bumps of hardened glue beneath the flowers.

It’s a crown. And so he thinks nothing of placing it on his head right then and there.

He doesn’t recognize the mistake in that until he’s immediately blinded by camera flashes, and the crowd roars. He smiles for them all anyway, because it’s too late: the association is made overnight, and at the end of his exhibition skate, it rains blue. In the summer, a fashion house commissions him to do a shoot against a cascade of blue roses. His costume designer wants to milk it for all it’s worth, and Viktor has to kick up a fuss to stop him from incorporating the flower into all of his costumes that season.

What he doesn’t tell Yakov, for fear of messing up this ‘good thing’, is that he hates it. Does no-one know what blue roses represent? Do they not care? Or maybe they _do_ know, and the message is deliberate: that he’s been placed on a pedestal, shrouded in mystery? That he’s difficult to know, and impossible to get close to, but it’s fine because to just look at him is enough, that’s enough… is that what people think?

“You should not obsess over it, Vitya.” Lilia’s tone is severe as always, but there’s gentleness in her hands and wrists as she arranges the blue roses that a nameless admirer had scattered outside Viktor’s hotel room into something less chaotic. “People are careless. You should not read too much into it.”

The morning he finds out that Lilia and Yakov are divorcing, that same fashion house from last year sends him a proposal: _We’ll put your hair in a braid, with blue roses threaded through it - wouldn’t that be nice?_

Viktor sends out a bouquet of dried white roses to Lilia’s new address.

And then, he cuts his hair.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

Years later, Viktor stares at the centerpiece of the table he shares with Yakov and the rest of the Russian team. The ‘vase’ isn’t so much an actual receptacle as it is a glass sculpture of a figure skater doing a layback spin - and there, in the ring formed by the space between her arms, they’ve pushed sprays of roses in white and shades of pink, and isn’t that so clever? Mila seems to think so, anyway.

Viktor hardly notices. It’s almost surreal, how this banquet feels exactly the same as the banquet last year, and the year before that. And so on. Granted, everyone around him is throwing the phrase ‘5-time GPF winner’ at him tonight, and if nothing else, this at least helps Viktor to remember what year it is. Is that sad? It probably is. But he smiles and laughs and pretends to sip from the same champagne flute he’s been walking around with since this party started, because he can’t let them know. _Ungrateful_ , they’d call him. _Egotistical. Greedy._ So many words, so many blue rose crowns. He should be happy with his lot. He was, once upon a time. Wasn’t he? This was his dream, wasn’t it? He’s not even sure who he’s asking anymore.

The answer comes to him that night anyway: in a crash of someone tripping over a bump in the carpet, taking the nearest tablecloth - and everything resting on said tablecloth - down with him. It takes too long for Viktor to recognize him, but he eventually remembers the finalist from Japan, with his step sequences and spins to die for. The one who might have seen the podium, had all of his jumps not seemed cursed.

Yuri sneers. “Someone’s halfway through another ‘crash and burn’.”

Viktor elbows him in the side. He hopes that Yuuri - right, that’s the name, Yuuri Katsuki from Japan - didn’t understand that, but the dejected look on his face when he picks himself up shows that he did.

But then his eyes harden into steel, and he jabs his finger into Yuri Plisetsky’s chest. “Dance battle!!”

From there, Viktor can no longer pinpoint the exact moment when he falls. Perhaps it’s when Yuuri soundly thrashes Yuri on the dance floor, with a grace in the flow of his limbs that should not have been possible with that much alcohol running through them? Or when he shimmies out of his dress pants, stares Chris down, and throws himself at the pole, dancing as though the world might end if he doesn’t?

No - it might be when Yuuri suddenly whips his head around to face him, catching Viktor in the middle of trying (failing) to sneak another video of him in action. Their eyes meet, and Yuuri makes a show of straightening his tie, before holding out a hand. “Dance with me!”

Later, after Viktor has already lost his heart in the whirlwind that is Yuuri Katsuki on sixteen flutes of champagne - but _before_ Yuuri launches himself at Viktor and half-pleads, half-yells at him to _‘be my coach!’_ \- there’s a spell of silence in between songs, which they use to catch their breaths. Viktor isn’t really thinking when he reaches out and plucks one of the lighter pink roses from a centerpiece.

But he _is_ thinking, very clearly, when he deliberately clips off all of the thorns from the stem. He offers it to Yuuri, who blinks at him once, takes the flower between his teeth, and dips him into another dance.

Viktor laughs, and lets himself be pulled back into Yuuri’s arms. Perhaps it’s just another flower to him, in the end. Just like it usually is, to everyone. But that’s fine. That’s fine.

(Because light pink roses signify: desire, passion, youth, energy, and the joy of life, things Yuuri has brought back to him in one magical night. But thornless roses say: _I fell in love with you at first sight_.)

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

What follows after that: three months of sheer silence; oppressive, _agonizing_.

And then, out of the blue, Yuuri sends him a message. It’s not a bouquet spilling words of love delivered on his doorstep - something Viktor himself has been tempted to send to Yuuri more times than he can count. But it’s not words either, and somehow, _somehow,_ that makes it all the more precious.

Viktor uproots his life without a second thought.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

 

When he finally arrives in Hasetsu, Viktor dispenses with flowers casually: bouquets for Hiroko to put in the vase on the front desk, a housewarming arrangement for the Nishigori family when they move in June. There’s a grocery store on the way to Minako’s ballet studio, and Viktor will pop in quickly to pick up a bunch of cut flowers so that they don’t arrive empty-handed. Yuuri never asks, though he watches intently as Viktor peruses the flowers in stock.  He usually picks up the freshest-looking bunch, and it is what it is.

It’s alright, he thinks to himself. He and Yuuri have different tokens with one another, sweets and hugs and tissue boxes shaped like dogs (and later: kisses, everywhere, rings exchanged beneath singing bells, a medal that is not quite gold). He feels that, between Yuuri who doesn't speak the language, and himself who's never quite met anyone conversant in it, perhaps there’s no need for flowers anymore.

 

✾ ✾ ✾ 

 

But one day in April, a full year after Viktor crashed into his life, a nervous-looking Yuuri stands behind the kitchen counter as Viktor wanders in, wondering what miracle woke his fiancé early today.

“Um, it’s… it’s for you.” Yuuri avoids his eyes and self-consciously tugs at the ends of his sleeves, hiding small cuts and scrapes on his hands. “They said this was important to you… that you’d understand. So…”

Viktor scarcely notices it. It’s hard to notice anything else in the room outside of what’s right in front of him: an elaborate arrangement of daisies, forget-me-nots, and white chrysanthemums. In the center, a single red rose stands in full bloom, promising something that Viktor has not dared to hope for in years.

Japan has a language of flowers of its own, he learns that day. They call it 花言葉, _Hanakotoba_ , and though some of the words are different from what Viktor knows, some are the same. Yuuri describes each one in a soft, almost bashful tone of voice, and at the end of it, Viktor understands what every petal in this bouquet is trying to say: _my love is faithful; my love is true._

“Have you… always?” he asks, unable to form words, useless _words_.

Yuuri shakes his head with a smile. “I learned it for you.”

If he’s startled by the way Viktor suddenly throws his arms around him, he doesn’t show it. He just lets out a little laugh before returning the embrace, running a hand through silver hair while Viktor clings to him  as though he never wants to let go. He doesn’t say anything - neither of them does. Neither of them has to.

From that day on, in the languages that Viktor and Yuuri speak to one another, they use flowers to fill in the gaps left when words are not quite enough: singletons tucked behind ears or pinned to lapels, bouquets on birthdays and holidays, on good days and bad days, and random odd Tuesdays in between. They _understand_. And for the first time in what feels like forever, Viktor is no longer drowning in noise.

 

✾ ✾ ✾

**Author's Note:**

> Yuuya's lovely art can be found [here!](https://twitter.com/_nakutan_/status/997220638459879424) I'm so grateful for the chance to have collaborated with them! ❤
> 
> Thank you for reading, and thank you especially to those who supported _Kamome: A Soft Viktor Zine_!


End file.
